Laura Kelly is the Owner & President of The Handwork Studio. Laura has spent the last 17 years as an entrepreneur developing a curriculum and business around the idea of making handwork, machine sewing, and fashion available to kids.   

According to Laura, to embrace the entrepreneurial mindset you should be:

1) Focused: When you choose to pursue the entrepreneurial path, it can be easy to get distracted by shiny objects because they are more appealing or easier than doing the hard work necessary to fulfill your vision. Don’t abandon your dream. Instead, keep breathing life into your idea or business and continue to stay on your journey and commit to executing your vision. Avoid listening to outside noise and never compare yourself to others. One of the best ways to stay focused is to identify your long-term goal and then break it into micro goals or mini milestones you can achieve on a daily basis.

2) Resilient: In the entrepreneurial world, oftentimes things do not go as expected. A vendor might cancel or you might experience an issue with product design. Other individuals might even tell you that your idea will never work. However, you can’t let setbacks or disappointment stop you from pursuing your dream. If what you want to achieve were easy, everyone would be doing it. I encourage you to flex your resilience muscle by failing fast. When things don’t go as planned, take a breath, reflect, and keep moving forward. 

3) Adaptable: As an entrepreneur it is critical to be focused, but you have to be willing to change and adjust based on what you learn as you go. Don’t get too attached to one way of thinking or one idea. How you do things in the beginning of your business will not be the way you are doing business even a year from now. In fact, the only way you can really grow as an entrepreneur is to iterate—test ideas, analyze outcomes, come up with new processes, and then repeat!  

Laura Kelly is the Owner & President of The Handwork Studio. Her professional career began working in NYC—first in the travel industry then on Wall Street for a consulting firm that specialized in financial institutions. In those two careers, Laura put to use her Marketing degree that she earned from Northeastern University. As a child of the 60’s and 70’s, Laura’s crafting experience was limited. Her mom didn’t really do much of it as the feminist movement was in full swing and it was seen as traditional women’s work, so she never grew up surrounded by crafting. Laura had always longed to be an artist and took up knitting as a hobby after her children were born. However, Laura’s experience as a mother and her desire to build a business led her to create The Handwork Studio. Laura has spent the last 17 years as an entrepreneur developing a curriculum and business around the idea of making handwork, machine sewing, and fashion available to kids.